Monthly Archives: March 2008

This past week has been spent rather hermet­i­cally. It’s spring break for Yale, which means New Haven is pleasant and empty (disrupted only by last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, a riotous city-wide, Guinness-fueled, verdure-clad affair, accom­pa­nied by much brawling). I’ve been working doggedly to finish Dave’s concerto, and though so far he’s been admirably patient with me, I’m setting next weekend as my personal deadline. We’ll see how that works out.

Other­wise, I’ve kept busy doing odd jobs around the record­ing studio, exper­i­ment­ing with new Thai noodle recipes, and raptly tracking the shipment of a new Macbook Pro (which seems to be taking the slow boat from Shanghai).

My friends at Cordarounds shipped me some beta pants yester­day, which I’ve been field-testing. I think they’re the best summer-weather trousers ever devised, and strongly recom­mend them to all eligible wearers (which, sadly, excludes all but the very brawni­est of women). You can read all about the science behind the wales here.

The Times adver­tis­ing supple­ment (sorry, T Design) has a feature on one of my favorite design­ers, Naoto Fukasawa. Like every­thing in the T maga­zines, it’s a little light on substance, more just an excuse for everyone to talk about how great he is. Even Dieter Rams has nothing but breath­less praise, and he’s German! Somebody should straight away get to work import­ing those +/-0 products. Other­wise, I might just have to move to Tokyo.

I had the pleasure of hearing Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads live two and a half times last week: one and a half times in New Haven and again last night in New York. It’s an album-length oratorio, of sorts, which mixes instru­men­tal numbers with vocal settings of primary-source texts taken from the week follow­ing Hurri­cane Katrina.

Music that tries to make a polit­i­cal point rarely convinces me— which is probably my personal failing, since the two seem to have gone together since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of politics. What makes Katrina Ballads surpass the category of polit­i­cal music is that its politics are almost beside the point; it feels more like a work about under­stand­ing than one about propa­ganda. If Dennis Hastert happens to come off as a cold-hearted lunatic, or George W. Bush as a stut­ter­ing block­head, that’s because they actually did that week. Katrina Ballads has a message, certainly, but it’s given to us with admirable perspec­tive and remark­able self­less­ness; I never once felt I was being preached to, or emotion­ally manip­u­lated. (Inci­den­tally, I wonder if the choice of the word “Ballads” has anything to do with Rzewski’s North American Ballads; the last piece of that set, Winns­boro Cotton Mill Blues, is the only other polit­i­cally-moti­vated work I can think of that is as success­ful and affect­ing.)

Perhaps another reason Katrina Ballads feels so differ­ent from other polit­i­cal music is that the music itself is always the first priority. I’ve always known Ted is a good composer, but what I hadn’t known is that he has the ability, chameleon-like, to blend his style into prac­ti­cally any musical genre that suits his purpose, and he makes them all work together as a consis­tent whole. He sets Barbara Bush’s infamous “This is working very well for them” quote (from an NPR interview—it’s still shocking to hear it) to easy-breezy but harmon­i­cally subver­sive ragtime, Kanye West’s impas­sioned tirade (from a live NBC telethon) to slowly-building gospel/R&B (though it’s not made explicit until the climac­tic line “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”), and Anderson Cooper’s blus­ter­ing anger in high operatic style. Though most of this music is quite acces­si­ble, it never sounds cliché or facile. The instru­men­tal writing is beau­ti­fully handled, skill­fully employ­ing more “new music-y” tricks (multi­phon­ics, looping pedals, piano-drumming) to serve the greater dramatic purpose.

Of course, the piece wouldn’t be such a hit if the perform­ers weren’t so intense and dedi­cated. Ted’s hand-picked band (includ­ing many Manhat­tan School new-music stal­warts) clearly love the music, and love playing together. The five singers are pitch-perfect, navi­gat­ing Ted’s diffi­cult passages and styl­is­tic shifts with aplomb. Mezzo Abby Fischer was eerily, smarmily composed as Barbara Bush; soprano Allison Semmes was in turn preter­nat­u­rally unflap­pable as Sen. Mary Landrieu, then vulner­a­ble and affect­ing as flood victim Ashley Nelson. Tenor (maybe coun­tertenor? that stuff was pretty high) Isaiah Robinson really stole the show in the Kanye West movement; the climax of the song was an almost joyful release of angry passion. Ted himself took a break from conduct­ing to deliver the virtu­osic “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, a Nixon-esque disin­te­gra­tion of the president’s comment to former FEMA head Michael Brown. And baritone Anthony Turner, singing the text of another hurri­cane victim, conveyed utter deso­la­tion and despair in “My wife, I can’t find her body”.

I’m pretty much in awe of Ted right now. He’s expended a tremen­dous amount of time, effort, and money to bring all these people together and perform (and in a couple weeks, record) this huge, diffi­cult piece, which he not only wrote, but also conducts and sings. I think Katrina Ballads has a great future, and I can’t think of anybody better to advocate it than Ted. I hope it makes him famous.

We filled Roulette to capacity for last Saturday’s IGIGI concert. Repre­sen­ta­tives of three gener­a­tions of my family were there! The gener­a­tion gap was defi­nitely in atten­dance, too; Lainie’sTongue of Thorns, a raucous four-axe homage to the Velvet Under­ground, provoked some ear-plugging by the over-50 crowd, while the 20-some­things grooved content­edly in their seats. It made me wonder how many composers’ parents listen to their progeny’s music on a regular basis; how many could even stand to? I loaded up some of my music on my Mom’s new iPod, so I’ll have to sneak a look at her play counts.

I think part of the reason for this new-music gener­a­tion gap is that people my age have no real concept of what “New Music” is, or how to approach it. We’ve grown up exposed to a much wider variety of sounds than our parents, which both desen­si­tizes our ears but also makes them open-minded. Our parents, on the other hand, were the last children to have been brought up with the ideal of the concert hall as Sacred Space, and its conflu­ent Modernist notions of “pure music”. They expect music to operate at several differ­ent levels of activity, all at once, all the time: intel­lec­tual, narra­tive, and perfor­ma­tive.

From this stand­point, a piece like Jen Stock’s Grainary doesn’t make sense as a concert work, because it creates an atmos­phere with spare, repet­i­tive sounds and video rather than a rigor­ously devel­oped progres­sion of musical “material”. For me, though, it evoked some­thing my old teacher John Halle said in regard to Alvin Lucier’s music: “some­thing that should be boring, but isn’t”. Large-scale mechanical/industrial processes are one of those things, and I think Jen hinted at this poten­tial fasci­na­tion in Grainary. I always love those terrible segments on the Food Network or the History Channel where they show the mesmer­iz­ing insides of a camera-lens factory, or the candy assembly line. Here’s a great photo essay of how Legos are made. I think why I love watching these and why I love listen­ing to repet­i­tive music stem from the same part of my brain.

Lainie’s music contin­ues to enchant me in this regard. Her two new pieces, Tongue of Thorns and Do You? revealed an even stricter mini­mal­ist bent than her earlier music. I thought the melodica-clarinet-voice trio in Do You? was partic­u­larly cool, and I’m always a sucker for those insanely catchy frac­tured rhythms, though I think it could have been even better if the instru­ments were ampli­fied and mixed to ensure proper balance (and boost the volume).

Alex’s new pieces mix his incred­i­bly catholic tastes in surpris­ing, intrigu­ing, often quite funny ways. I actually LOLed during Slightly Less Awkward People, which I don’t do nearly enough of at concerts in general. I played The Last Resort Party Band with my Yale friends and composer-saxo­phon­ist Emilia Tamburri, which we recorded the next day— I’m eager to hear it— and then Alex performed his melodica/piano piece Inland himself. I’m really inter­ested in the possi­bil­i­ties of this combi­na­tion; the toy-like melodica holds up remark­ably well.

I’m looking forward to more collab­o­ra­tions with these wonder­ful composers in the near future… stay tuned. I have lots more updates that might have to wait until next week.